Copyright in the Courts: The Return of the Lion

• Author: Owen Dean

The song

In the early 1950s the recording of Mbube released by Gallo Records, already a good seller in South Africa, found its way to America and came to the attention of Pete Seeger, the folksinger. He liked what he heard and transcribed the music from the record to make his own song, which he called Wimoweh (a corruption of the Zulu lyrics, Uyimbube, or "he is the lion"). Wimoweh was successful in the United States in the 1950s, and was later reworked into another version in the 1960s by song writers George Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, as The Lion Sleeps Tonight. In this form the song became a major hit and has remained popular for more than 40 years. Then in the mid-1990s it was incorporated into the Disney musical The Lion King. But neither the origins of the song, in Mbube, nor the role played by Solomon Linda was acknowledged, and the song was presented as being of American origin.

The rights

Solomon Linda had assigned his worldwide copyright in Mbube to the Gallo Record Company for a consideration of 10 shillings. He died in 1962, leaving a wife, Regina, and four children. In 1983 the American music publishing company, Folkways, which had gained control of Wimoweh, exacted for a consideration of one dollar an assignment of Regina’s rights (as his legal heir) to the renewal term of Wimoweh under United States copyright law, and threw in at the same time her worldwide rights to the song, such as they may have been. Regina died in 1990. In 1992, with litigation raging in the United States regarding Wimoweh and The Lion Sleeps Tonight, the rights to which had been acquired by Abilene Music, Folkways exacted a further assignment of worldwide rights to Mbube from the Linda daughters for another dollar. No stone had been left unturned to ensure that the Linda family had no claim to the copyright in Mbube.

In the late 1990s, journalist Rian Malan wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine exposing the machinations which had taken place and making the point that, while the derivatives of Mbube had made millions of dollars, the Linda daughters, one of whom had recently died from AIDS, were living in abject poverty in South Africa and deriving no material benefit from the fruits of their father’s creative work. The article caused an outcry in South Africa. And it fostered a resolve to take legal steps...